WEST PALM BEACH — Mark Dougan, the founder of the anti-Sheriff Ric Bradshaw website pbsotalk.com, flew to Russia this week and says he is preparing his application for political asylum in the land of Vladimir Putin.

Dougan says he doesn’t trust Palm Beach County authorities, especially the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, to protect him if he were jailed in the wake of an FBI raid on his Palm Beach Gardens house last month.

Federal and local authorities seized a dozen computer hard drives, six computers and several cell phones and tablets.

Dougan has not been charged with a crime. His passport was seized by the feds but handed back to Dougan.

He was not ordered to stay in this area but when he talked to FBI agents recently, their questions seemed to indicate he would be charged criminally.

The two search warrants served were for hacking, computer crimes, extortion and interception of communications.

GoDaddy took down pbsotalk.com last week, despite it being important for the local political discourse in Palm Beach County, a famed First Amendment lawyer told us last week.

The website allowed PBSO deputies to criticize the brass anonymously, something that rubbed Bradshaw and the higher-ups the wrong way for six years. When it was taken off-line, so where thousands of pages spelling out dysfunctions, disorganization, nepotism, waste and other stories that otherwise weren’t presented by the dying corporate media.

“Me leaving the country and asking Russia to stay doesn’t mean I’m guilty of anything,” Dougan said by telephone from Moscow. “I do not trust that Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI to be fair and not manufacture something against me me. They told me to my face they’d get me.

“I’ve been investigated by PBSO for more than six years and they couldn’t bring charges. I’m alone and I don’t have the money to fight this rigged system,” said Dougan, a former PBSO deputy. “I know that they’re just dying to me in jail, and I simply don’t think I’ll be treated with respect.”

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Dougan believes he is being harassed as of late because pbsotalk.com published the private information of thousands of local law enforcement officials in February. He says the information was not obtained from hacking but from mining public records. The info went up, he says, to retaliate against hacking that PBSO conducts against unsuspecting citizens, Dougan said.

“My case is totally political. If there’s one thing that Bradshaw hates more than anything, it’s dissent,” Dougan said. “Hey, I might start the site back up from Russia.”

Last year, pbsotalk.com and Gossip Extra published audio recordings culled from telephone calls between PBSO Detective Mark Lewis and a woman.

In the calls, Lewis bragged about being assigned to digging up dirt on Bradshaw’s critics, including Dougan, reporters and even a candidate for sheriff who was arrested on a PBSO warrant during the campaign. The charges of fraud were dropped by the state attorney’s office.